Gary Brown: Going the extra yard starts with a good line

I’m one of those insufferable souls who needs to make the lines go in a different direction each occasion I mow my lawn. I never mow around, from outside to inside. That would be mowing like my dad.

Gary Brown

I like lawns with lines.

You know the lines I mean. You mow one way and the grass behind the mower is light. You mow the other direction and the grass is dark. The more you mow, the more it forms an alternating pattern of lines. I like the look.

It doesn’t make much sense, really. A lawn is just grass, long or short. To even take time to notice the lines is the result of an idle mind — one that doesn’t have much more important things to think about than how to get me back and forth across the yard. No high IQ is needed for that. Any kind of challenge to such a mind — “Keep the lines straight!” — is bound to intrigue it.

More rational thought makes me figure that if we were supposed to fuss over making our mower marks line the lawn like a baseball outfield, we’d all be living in houses with bleachers along the edges of our driveways.

Not seeing any grandstands in my landscaping, I should just mow and not worry about lines.

I can’t. I’d miss them.

Simple lines

Oh, I don’t bother with intricate designs. I make no geometric shapes when I mow. Circles or diamonds might look nice later, but that would require some deeper thought at the moment of mowing. My mind rebels against any involved planning.

“Hey, I’m not looking for a Mensa puzzle here,” my mind tells me each time I start the lawnmower. “Just figure out which way you mowed it last time, start mowing in a different direction, and give me time to think about golf.”

Yes, I’m one of those insufferable souls who needs to make the lines go in a different direction each occasion I mow my lawn. First I mow straight across. Then I mow up and down. The next two mowings are diagonal cuts — first to the right of perpendicular, and then to the left.

I never mow around, from outside to inside. That would be mowing like my dad. I may have learned his values and grown into his maturity, but accepting his mowing method was too much for me.

“If you mow around, and blow the grass inside,” he explained in an era before mulching and bagging mowers, “you won’t have to rake as much at the end.”

No chip off the block

No, I didn’t inherit my obsession. My dad didn’t much care about lawn lines. Few men in his generation did. They grew up during the Depression. They served in World War II. They raised large families. It didn’t occur to them to worry about whether some neighbor praised them because “Your lawn looks just like Yankee Stadium!”

Dad’s idea of rotating the mowing of his lawn was making sure each son mowed it the same number of times during the summer, so nobody whined about it.

No, I became a line lover all on my own.

A lawn without lines, I sense, is a yard unmowed. And maybe that’s why I feel good inside when I see that the lines have returned to lawns each spring.

When my lawn has lines, it’s a task finished. And I can cross it off my list.

I like lists. I prefer lists with a lot of lines drawn through things.

A pattern — some reoccurring line of thinking — is developing here.

Contact Gary Brown at gary.brown@cantonrep.com.

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